


Ferry

by aderyn



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Ghosts, Hauntings, Hope, I Believe in Sherlock Holmes, Love, Mythology - Freeform, Pining, Post-Reichenbach, Rivers of London - Freeform, Romantic Angst, Spirits, genius
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-24
Updated: 2013-10-24
Packaged: 2017-12-30 08:17:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1016270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock talks to the spirits of London.</p>
<p>They're not pleased.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ferry

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you [quarryquest](http://quarryquest.livejournal.com/2013/10/21/), for the genius of London, again, with hauntings!

The first day he's dead he walks around London blinkered, a ghost among ghosts. Not a city he's ever seen, and he's seen them all. His pulse is louder, his skin thinner, as the veil between the mind and everything in which it doesn't believe. He might become a molecule, a particle, a quark, an invisible thing among invisible things, a haunting of his old self.

A genius.  
  
 *****

"Right, you can't stand there," the voice at his elbow says, low, not-quite-cultured, something rich in it, non-rhotic.

He's been in the shadows, looking up at the windows of the flat, saw John's hunched shadow pass back and forth a few times. Packing. Moving. Stiff shoulders. A little drag.

Felt his dry throat clutch at that. Turned in his pocket the oak and rose pound coin he’d lifted casually from John’s dresser three days a life and two deaths ago.

“Sherlock,” says the voice, and he twitches in her direction, catches her face in the streetlight.

"Mary," she says, as though he doesn't know, "LeBone."

"I know who you are."

Of course he does, the voice anyway, his familiar.

He’s never spoken to her before, nor she to him so directly, not with all the lamplight in her human face. Her hair the color of soot. Painted plate-glass hands.

He doesn’t deduce, or not as he might. The logic’s different here.

Slower than water.

“Why now?” he says, takes another glance at the window, hitches his sore shoulder up in the awkward new coat.

She gives him a shrug, moves to put a hand on his arm, doesn’t.

“Because you’re dead.”

_Or you’re very good at pretending._

“Yes,” he says, “I’m quite dead.”

He can see through, almost, to her heart, the breeze southerly lifting the filmy scarf, the strands of hair from around her white ribs, the square spire of her spine.

No John in the window. He’s gone.

“Oh, look what the cat’s dragged in,” Mary says of a sudden.

“Not good,” mutters the bleached creature that slips into their den of shadow and light, “not good at all.”

He’s got an earring in his left ear, a silvery stud. There’s something in the way he clanks, grinds, that’s steadying, a brace Sherlock’s felt before the nights he’s slept, when he’s come home, turned the key in the lock. When he’s spoken the address, spoke it for the first time in a lab, saw John’s eyes shift from horizons of despair to something else entirely.

“My partner,” Mary says, “Baker.”

“Sherlock,” Baker says, smirks bricks and suits, “a pleasure. Not.” A packet of cigarettes, a brand Sherlock's never seen, peeks black from a seamed pocket.

A smoke would be nice. And one more sighting before he goes.

Of the shade he’ll leave behind.

“Time to go, mate,” Baker says, claps a palm to Sherlock’s tender shoulder, “time to go.”

They escort him to the boundaries of the City, all of Westminster grey with twilight and mourning, the buildings tilt-shift with grief. Off–kilter, alone.

“Goodbye for now," Mary says, blesses him with something sweet, secret as opiate.

“Will you,” Sherlock says, considers their strange faces, lets it cost him. _Watch over him._

Their forms slip free, send up an answer in the neon and brickshine.

_You’ve done a stupid thing._

_For a genius.  
_

_But we forgive you._

_We always do._

*****

All the sniperless windows in the world can’t be worth this.

But they are.

*****

He said goodbye to Molly in the morgue, watched a single tear slip down the side of her nose.

Never noted its exact slope until he saw it again on the face of a district.

Molly’s used to spirits.

All those bodies, animated, might pour forth from Bart’s, shamble, not-zombies, into the turnaround, wait for a suicide. Or a miracle.

*****

The city sings with deductions. That’s how hauntings happen.

He walks.  
  
 *****

Mycroft called him ‘little brother’ and said ‘your city’ and swept a hand across the vista outside and handed him a passport.

“Don’t linger.”

Of course he does.

There was the grave to visit. He saw a ghost there, not his, not anyone’s, wandering homeless, casting its negative on the black marble. 

His pupils normally reactive, his bruises not likely to cause a bleed; he sees what he sees.

Watching John there is difficult. From the dead city he looks smaller, paler, ink-stained, slumped, unarmed.

Defeated.

Not long ago he took Sherlock’s hands in his, held them and set to fixing. Pinned him to life, kept him fast.

It didn't hold.

*****

What lives in the gaps between seeing and observing?

Ghosts.

*****

London Bridge says _time to go, time to go._

Along with the chimes.

The clanks of chains, jailhouses, handcuffs.

The distant thrum of his networks.

The dead eyes of a madman not yet closed.

Sherlock shoulders a bag, tucks round a hood, limps to the banks under the shrill cries of gulls.

The grey waters of his dreams. Fire on their surface.The pyrite gold of the dawn.

He could take his city apart, pull particle from particle and find all he needs to know. He could. But he won’t, can’t leave her like that. Not now.

“It's not good, you know, trespassing,” Mary told him at the edges. In the city of the dead she means, these layers meant for other times, for pasts and for futures.

The present is mineral, is pyrite, is fool's gold, and he is a fool.

*****

_I do love you, Sherlock, I do._

It's obvious.

The new coat closes round the things he can’t carry. Even the last pair of gloves he wore on a case, the one John retrieved, legging it back seven blocks to the chip shop to scoop it from their scarred table. Little daemons laughing in the crossings while he jogged back, handed it over.

“Here, no sense in having a cold hand.”

No.

No sense at all.

*****

The gold-flecked eyes of London open; the sun breaks the jail of the bridges.

He’s never been so alone.

*****

“Hullo,” says the black-haired boy in the grey anorak.

Hunch in his hood, sniffle, cold coming on, not a surprise considering.

John would brew honeyed something. Send him to bed.

Or shoot a man, set it to rights.

The kid makes a fluid motion in his direction.

“Don't speak to the rivers then?”

Old man’s voice in an urchin’s body.

“You know I do.”

Short, a trickle, grey-black. Corvid on his forearm.

“Ravensbourne.”

“Please,” the kid says, stops to pinch something shiny from the bird's ruff, “call me Bourne.”

“Thought you were your father there for a second.”

"Mmm. Daddy Thames is something of a bastard. Does like to sham youth.”

“Yes. We're acquainted.”

“He'll kick my arse, if I speak to you long. Considers it his job to do the talking for all of us.”

A hitch in the breath of the river, a puff of wind.

“But he's given me permission to take you across.”

Something in Sherlock wells up a little then, spills over into the catchment.

"Ferryman, then?”

“River, anyway.”

Sherlock sits in the bow of the boat, watches the lines come free in the brackish water.

The raven hops up his arm; he lets it.

“Pay up,” Bourne's raven says, cracks the dark keratin, tilts gloss-to on Sherlock’s aching wrist.

“Wants his coin,” Bourne says fondly, “Little me, you know. Call him 'Ford.”

Sherlock takes from his pocket John’s pound with its leaf and bloom, with its England shining, the little crime he’d cling to, yields it to the dark beak and the bright eye.

"He's got two brothers, Quaggy and Kyd. Trouble since the nest."

Sherlock doesn't reply.

“Chin up,” Bourne says, “Tide’ll carry you back, when it’s time. Are you armed?”

“Yes,” Sherlock says, coughs. The salt breeze, still southerly, carries indoles he doesn’t know.

“Chin up,” says 'Ford, tweaks the edge of Sherlock’s hood.

Those nails, hop-clinging, catching, are the only things keeping him here.

There’s the city slipping past in the stream, all reflections and possibles. All suspects and old loves.

Scenes of crimes. Light the color of John's. Of John. Heartbreaking over the skylines.

Around the dead and the unseen, the spirits, the genii, the ghosts, all the lost and grieved and unbelieved-in, London is alive.

**Author's Note:**

> [The River Ravensbourne and Deptford Creek](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Ravensbourne)  
> [ The River Quaggy and Kyd Brook](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Quaggy)  
> [Oak and rose pound coin](http://www.coins-of-the-uk.co.uk/pics/dec/100/1pd13e.jpg20), didn’t actually come out until 2013.


End file.
